Category: music

“Sources tell NY1 that a letter from James Claffey, the President of Local 1, sent to members in the stagehands union earlier this week, said the Met rejected a proposal to freeze union wages for the next five years. Instead, opera management pushed for a 14.5 percent cut in pay and benefits.”

“Movie theater owners throughout the world are fretting over the possibility of a lockout at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. The Met’s live broadcasts into theaters on Saturdays have generated an estimated $300 million since Julie Taymor’s production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute was beamed into cinemas in 2006.”

Joseph Horowitz, looking back at what U.S. opera houses were before the 20th century (smaller, more eclectic, and more popular), argues that the size of the Met’s auditorium, along with the company’s outsize influence, has led to “a presiding notion of opera giving priority to big voices hurled into big spaces, singing words in foreign tongues set by deceased European composers … a notion of ‘grand opera’ that is increasingly unsustainable.”

“In a nutshell, QuickHitz doesn’t care if you’re Drake, Lorde or Lana Del Rey. Your single is going to get cut down to about two minutes, with a hard target of 24 songs — about twice the number common to a patient society — during each hour of airtime.”

Tom Service: “The recording industry tried to fix in the collective imagination what individual musical works should be, like the totemic masterpieces of the Western canon (or rather, like those pieces of music that were turned into canonised totems, in part by the recording industry): a series of desirable, aspirational cultural and commercial objects, a collection of black-lacquer-magicked things that could be literally possessed.” Not any more …

“The Louisville Orchestra is reporting a $20,000 budget surplus – the first time it has been in the black since it filed for bankruptcy nearly four years ago.”

James Jorden: “It’s not hard to understand how the Metropolitan Opera’s general manager Peter Gelb got a bad rap … but the dark clouds hovering over Mr. Gelb should not obscure his very real achievements.” And those achievements go well beyond the HD simulcasts.

“What he’s asking us to do,” Karen says, “is to think of these cuts as an investment in the Met, but to be a smart investor you have to have some faith in management and we just don’t have that.”

“So with the internet letting us hear just about any music and see any musician any time we want, for a comparatively low cost of entry, in theory it could provide an ideal opportunity to get rid of genres. Unfortunately, one thing technology can’t do is make the day longer than 24 hours. There’s more information, and more music, more easily accessible to more people than ever before, but no one actually has time to read or listen to more than a fraction of it. So we still must rely on gatekeepers and sorting mechanisms, one of which is musical genre, and radio, retail, presenters, and media all continue to categorize music according to whether it is rock, pop, hip-hop, country, R&B, classical, blues, folk, jazz, and so on.”

“One of the challenges in composing for such durations is the question as to how to keep the music playing on into an uncertain future,” composer Jem Finer explains in the campaign video.